Finally, after back-to-back championships won by the Kansas City Chiefs, there’s a new king in the NFL. On Sunday night, the Philadelphia Eagles jumped out to a commanding 24-0 lead at halftime and never looked back, cruising to a 40-22 win in Super Bowl LIX over Kansas City. 

It was a convincing win to cap off an utterly dominant Eagles season, one powered by their star-studded defense and the best running back in the NFL. Meanwhile, on the other side of Pennsylvania, another NFL team tried to deploy a similar strategy but has instead stuttered its wheels for nearly a decade. 

The Steelers salivated at what the Eagles did this season, and their style of winning will undoubtedly reinforce Pittsburgh’s belief that it is not all that far away from “the confetti game,” as Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin calls it. 

But how the Eagles pulled off this Super Bowl victory is exactly why the Steelers haven’t won a playoff game — let alone get close to winning a ring — in eight years. 

After sporting a bottom-10 defense nearly across the board in 2023, the Eagles made sweeping changes to that side of the ball. They fired defensive coordinator Sean Desai and replaced him with Vic Fangio, and went heavy on defense in the draft, spending their first three picks on defensive talent. 

In free agency, they brought in C.J. Gardner-Johnson and took flyers on guys like Zach Baun, who blossomed into a Defensive Player of the Year candidate in Philadelphia’s defense. This season, the Eagles were the only team to hold opponents to under 300 average yards per game, were second in points allowed at 17.8 and led the league with only 174.2 passing yards allowed per game. 

In the Super Bowl, Fangio’s unit stuffed Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes into a locker, sacking him six times and picking him off twice. It was the most uncomfortable Mahomes has ever looked in a game. 

Philadelphia did all of this despite not spending a fortune to build it. Yes, it helps that players like Quinyon Mitchell, Cooper Dejean and Jalen Carter are all playing on rookie deals, but the Eagles ranked 25th in defensive spending this season, coming in at under $63 million, per Spotrac. 

The Steelers have thrown every bit of spare change they can find at the defensive side of the ball, spending an NFL-leading $127 million on defense last season. Their biggest free agent move was signing an ex-divisional rival in Patrick Queen to a massive contract, and Steelers general manager Omar Khan traded away one of his best wide receiver options, Diontae Johnson, to add another cornerback to the mix on defense. 

Despite the high name value that the Steelers’ defense has, they weren’t one of the elite defenses in the NFL this year. They allowed 326.7 yards per game, good for 12th place, and 20.4 points per game, good for eighth place. 

They were good, but not great — a mantra that has described the Steelers since Barack Obama was still in office. What the Eagles showed is that throwing endless money at your problems can’t always solve them, especially if they aren’t the right people. 

That also applies to coaching. Desai was canned after the Eagles lost six of their last seven and were embarrassed in the postseason, bowing out in the Wild Card round. 

Sound familiar? 

Philadelphia wasn’t afraid of change, particularly when its expectations for itself weren’t met. The Steelers, meanwhile, retained their defensive coordinator Teryl Austin, even after his vaunted defensive unit gave up 299 rushing yards in the game and 21 points in the first half against the Ravens in the Wild Card round. 

But that willingness to make changes has come from even higher than the head coach. The Eagles have won a Super Bowl with two different coaches in less time than the Steelers have simply made it out of Wild Card Weekend. 

After Doug Pederson had three underperforming years following his 2017 Super Bowl win, general manager Howie Roseman fired him, brought in Nick Sirianni and revamped the coaching staff, something they have since tinkered with multiple times to reach the top. 

Pittsburgh’s ownership has made it clear they still believe in Tomlin, even as nearly 75% of the league has won a playoff game more recently than him. 

In media availability after the Steelers’ playoff loss, Tomlin dismissed the idea that the Steelers needed to plummet in the standings for a year to acquire a great quarterback in the draft, citing Philadelphia’s Jalen Hurts as a prime example. 

Hurts, a second-round selection in 2020 that the Steelers passed on, is indeed an example of that. But he also represents how an organization should properly build around a quarterback they believe in. 

Hurts has tons of talent, but no one ranks him as the best quarterback in the league. To boost him and play to his strengths, the Eagles acquired two top-tier receivers, A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, and made the best signing of the offseason when they brought in Saquon Barkley to power their running game. 

The Steelers, who have practically abandoned developing their offense for years now, set up both Justin Fields and Russell Wilson with a bare-bones receiving group and a spotty run game. 

The Steelers are not totally off base in their thought process. For as much as we talk about how today’s NFL is a pass-heavy, offense-first league, the Eagles proved you can still lean on the run game and defense to carry you through. 

But they are entirely off in their execution of that vision. The Eagles were never afraid to make changes. They didn’t worry about who would pick up Pederson when they fired him. They bottomed out for a year, getting them high draft capital to boost the roster around Hurts, a key part in his development. 

The Steelers, meanwhile, have lived in their fears for years. They haven’t made any changes out of fear of disrupting the status quo, the same one that has had them at 9-8 or 10-7 and getting assaulted annually in the Wild Card game. 

The Eagles are what the Steelers wish they were. But only one gets to call themselves Super Bowl champions.